7 Malaysian Startups Disrupting the Tech Industry Right Now

Malaysia’s technology scene has moved well beyond the early image of startups being small companies trying to find their first customers.

A new generation of Malaysian technology companies is building products for industries that have traditionally depended on paperwork, physical processes, fragmented suppliers, expensive software or outdated systems.

Some are using artificial intelligence and drones. Others are transforming insurance, car buying, business management, procurement and digital design.

The interesting part is that many of these companies are not trying to invent completely new industries. Instead, they are taking industries that already have enormous demand and changing how those industries work.

That approach is becoming increasingly important in Malaysia. The government-backed MYStartup platform now provides a national ecosystem covering startup funding, accelerators, investors, technology matching, market access and startup directories.

Here are seven Malaysian-founded or Malaysia-headquartered technology companies worth watching in 2026.

1. CARSOME — Changing How Southeast Asia Buys Used Cars

Buying a used car has traditionally involved classified advertisements, dealerships, inspections, negotiations and a fair amount of uncertainty.

CARSOME took a different approach.

Founded in Malaysia in 2015, CARSOME built an integrated digital platform around the used-car transaction. The company combines online vehicle discovery with inspection, refurbishment, ownership transfer and financing.

Its model is broader than simply putting used cars on a website. CARSOME says its vehicles go through a 175-point inspection process, while its certified cars can include a one-year warranty and a 14-day money-back guarantee. The company currently operates across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

That integrated model is important because the used-car market has several separate problems: determining the condition of a vehicle, establishing a reasonable price, arranging financing, completing paperwork and giving buyers confidence in the transaction.

CARSOME attempts to bring many of those steps into one technology-enabled ecosystem.

The company has also moved beyond its early startup phase. CARSOME reported its first full-year profitability in 2024, with EBITDA of US$10.5 million, and continued reporting positive developments in 2026. In June 2026, the company said first-quarter gross profit increased 25% year-on-year to RM158 million, while EBITDA reached approximately RM29 million.

That makes CARSOME an interesting example of how a Malaysian technology company can use software to reorganise an old-fashioned industry rather than simply create another consumer app.

Its wider significance is the idea of treating car ownership as a digital ecosystem rather than a single transaction.

2. StoreHub — Turning Small Businesses Into Digital Businesses

Restaurants, cafés and retail stores may look very different from technology companies, but they generate huge amounts of data every day.

Every sale, customer, product, payment and inventory movement creates information.

The problem for many small businesses is that this information has historically been scattered across cash registers, spreadsheets, notebooks and different software platforms.

StoreHub was built to address that problem.

Founded in Malaysia in 2013, StoreHub began with a cloud-based point-of-sale system before expanding into a broader operating platform for restaurants and retailers. Its products cover areas including POS, inventory, customer engagement, e-commerce, loyalty and ordering.

Today, StoreHub says its technology supports more than 20,000 retail and F&B outlets across Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and other markets.

That matters because digital transformation is not only about large corporations.

A neighbourhood restaurant that can automatically track inventory, analyse sales, manage customer relationships and connect physical and online orders is also undergoing digital transformation.

StoreHub’s approach effectively gives smaller businesses access to technology that might previously have been associated with larger companies.

The company has also expanded its model beyond the traditional cash-register concept. Its platform has included QR ordering, loyalty programmes, e-commerce and other tools designed to connect different parts of a business.

In 2022, StoreHub announced a US$13.5 million pre-Series B funding round and said its platform was already powering more than 15,000 paying retail and restaurant outlets across Southeast Asia.

The bigger trend here is clear: Malaysian startups are increasingly building the infrastructure behind everyday businesses, not just consumer-facing apps.

3. PolicyStreet — Bringing Insurance Into the Digital Economy

Insurance is one of those industries where the technology challenge is not necessarily creating a new product.

It is making an existing product easier to understand, distribute and integrate into everyday transactions.

That is the space PolicyStreet is targeting.

Founded in 2017 by Yen Ming Lee, Wilson Beh and Winnie Chua, PolicyStreet is a Malaysian insurtech company focused on digital insurance distribution and embedded insurance.

Its technology can connect insurance products with other digital services, creating opportunities for coverage to be offered at the point where a customer actually needs it.

That can apply to areas such as mobility, travel, logistics and gig-economy services.

PolicyStreet says its platform serves more than 5 million customers and has a total sum insured exceeding US$10 billion. The company is also backed by Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund.

Its history is particularly relevant to Malaysia’s fintech development.

PolicyStreet became the first homegrown InsurTech to receive Financial Adviser and Islamic Financial Adviser licences from Bank Negara Malaysia in 2019, according to the company. It subsequently obtained reinsurer and general insurer licences from the Labuan Financial Services Authority in 2021.

This regulatory development has allowed the company to move beyond simply comparing insurance products.

The broader disruption is happening at the intersection of finance, technology and distribution.

Instead of expecting customers to start their journey by visiting an insurance company, digital platforms can increasingly introduce insurance during another transaction.

That is a significant shift in how financial products can reach consumers.

4. Borong — Digitising Malaysia’s B2B Supply Chain

E-commerce is often associated with consumers buying clothes, electronics or food online.

Borong is tackling a less visible but much larger part of the economy: business-to-business procurement.

The company, originally founded as Dropee in 2017, started by trying to make wholesale procurement more accessible to Malaysian SMEs. It later rebranded as Borong and expanded into enterprise procurement.

Today, Borong describes itself as a B2B marketplace and eProcurement platform connecting enterprises, government-linked companies and SMEs with verified suppliers.

The company says its platform has more than 37,000 vetted suppliers, has facilitated more than RM28 billion in transactions and has served more than 190,000 businesses.

The technology becomes particularly interesting when procurement moves beyond simply searching for products.

Borong’s platform includes procurement workflows, supplier verification, ERP integrations, analytics and financing.

Its MIDAS technology, for example, is designed to provide AI-powered price benchmarking and spending intelligence. The company says the system uses millions of pricing records to help buyers assess prices before purchase orders are approved.

This is a different kind of digital disruption.

Consumers may never see Borong’s technology directly, but businesses can use it to manage purchasing more systematically.

A restaurant, retailer, manufacturer or large organisation can potentially discover suppliers, compare products, manage approvals and access financing within a connected digital environment.

Borong’s trajectory also shows how Malaysian startups are increasingly looking beyond consumer apps and building technology infrastructure for the business economy.

5. Aonic — Taking Drones From Gadgets to Industrial Tools

Drones were once mostly associated with photography and hobbyists.

That is no longer the case.

Malaysia’s Aonic has built its business around using drones and related technology to solve practical industrial and agricultural problems.

The company began in 2016 with drones for industrial applications and subsequently developed agricultural drone technology, mapping software, training programmes and other services. It rebranded from Poladrone to Aonic in 2022 as it expanded beyond its original drone focus.

Agriculture is one of the areas where the company’s technology becomes particularly interesting.

Aonic develops agricultural drones designed for spraying and spreading, while its software can support mapping, flight planning and field analysis.

Its proprietary agriculture software incorporates AI-driven plantation mapping and drone flight control, while its Airamap platform can process aerial data for agricultural analysis.

The company’s Mist Drone is another example. Aonic says the product is developed in Malaysia and is designed for precision spraying across crops including paddy, corn, sugarcane, pineapple, vegetables, oil palm, durian and coconut.

Aonic’s evolution is significant because the technology is not being positioned simply as a drone product.

It is becoming a complete operational system involving hardware, software, financing, training, servicing and agricultural inputs.

The company says it had expanded to more than 45 branches across Southeast Asia by the end of 2025 and continues to develop its agricultural technology ecosystem in 2026.

For Malaysia, this is particularly relevant because agriculture remains an important part of the economy.

Automation can potentially reduce reliance on manual processes while giving farmers access to more detailed information about their land and crops.

6. Aerodyne — Using AI and Drones for Infrastructure

Aonic is not the only Malaysian company pushing drone technology forward.

Aerodyne has taken the concept into large-scale industrial applications.

Headquartered in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, Aerodyne describes itself as a technology company working across drones, data and digital transformation. Its technology combines unmanned aerial systems with artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, cloud computing and data analytics.

The applications go well beyond taking aerial photographs.

Drones can be used for infrastructure inspection, telecommunications, utilities, oil and gas, agriculture, security and other industrial activities.

Aerodyne’s autonomous drone technology includes systems designed for coordinated drone operations, automated charging and AI-supported data analysis. Its technology stack can incorporate tools such as LiDAR, thermal imaging, photogrammetry and 3D point clouds.

The potential benefit is straightforward.

Instead of sending workers into difficult, dangerous or time-consuming environments to collect information manually, companies can use aerial systems to gather data remotely.

The technology can then turn that data into information that engineers and operators can use.

Aerodyne has also built an international presence from Malaysia. The company’s own materials describe it as a Malaysia-headquartered international drone, data and digital-transformation solutions provider, with operations and partnerships outside the country.

Its story reflects a wider change in the drone industry.

The next stage of drone technology is not necessarily about the aircraft itself. It is about what happens after the aircraft collects the data.

That is where AI, cloud computing, analytics and automation become increasingly important.

7. LottieFiles — Making Digital Motion Easier to Build

Not every technology startup has to deal with physical infrastructure.

Some change the tools developers and designers use to build digital products.

LottieFiles is a Malaysian-founded technology company that has become closely associated with the Lottie animation format.

Its platform allows designers to create, manage and deploy lightweight animations across websites, mobile applications and other digital products. LottieFiles says the Lottie format is significantly smaller than GIFs, helping developers add animation without relying on large media files.

The platform connects designers and developers through tools for creating animations, managing assets and integrating motion into products.

That sounds specialised, but motion design has become increasingly important as websites and apps compete for users’ attention.

Animations are now used for onboarding, buttons, loading screens, product interfaces, illustrations and interactive experiences.

LottieFiles has built a large global community around that demand.

The company currently says its platform is used by more than 16 million designers and developers from over 280,000 companies worldwide, with more than 800,000 free and premium animations available in its library.

Its technology also continues to evolve.

The platform supports creation through tools such as Figma, After Effects and its own browser-based creator, while dotLottie packages can combine animation assets into a smaller, more efficient format.

The company’s significance is that it is helping close the gap between design and software development.

A designer can create motion without having to build a completely different workflow for developers, while developers can integrate those animations into websites and applications with relatively little code.

It is a good example of how a Malaysian technology company can build a global product around a very specific technical problem.

What These Seven Companies Say About Malaysia’s Tech Industry

Looking across these seven companies, one pattern stands out.

Malaysia’s startup ecosystem is not centred on one type of technology.

CARSOME is transforming automotive commerce.

StoreHub is digitising retail and restaurants.

PolicyStreet is changing insurance distribution.

Borong is building digital procurement infrastructure.

Aonic and Aerodyne are applying drones, AI and data to physical industries.

LottieFiles is building infrastructure for digital design and development.

The common factor is not the technology itself.

It is the attempt to remove friction from industries where the old way of doing things is expensive, slow or difficult to scale.

That is important because some of the most useful technology businesses are not necessarily the ones with the most fashionable consumer applications.

A company that can save a farmer time, help a restaurant understand its customers, make procurement more transparent or reduce the difficulty of inspecting infrastructure can have a substantial economic effect without becoming a household name.

Malaysia’s national startup infrastructure is also becoming more organised. MYStartup provides a central platform for founders, investors, programmes, funding opportunities and technology-market access, reflecting the country’s broader effort to develop its startup ecosystem.

For entrepreneurs, investors and technology professionals watching Southeast Asia, that makes Malaysia a market worth paying attention to.

The country’s startup story is increasingly about companies taking Malaysian engineering, software and business ideas into regional and global markets.

The Bigger Trend: From Apps to Infrastructure

The next phase of Malaysia’s technology industry may be less about creating another consumer app and more about building infrastructure that other businesses depend on.

That shift can already be seen in the companies on this list.

CARSOME is building infrastructure around vehicle ownership.

Borong is building infrastructure for procurement.

StoreHub is building infrastructure for small-business operations.

PolicyStreet is building infrastructure around digital insurance.

Aonic and Aerodyne are connecting physical industries with software, AI and aerial data.

LottieFiles is helping developers and designers build digital experiences more efficiently.

These companies operate in very different industries, but their underlying strategy is similar: identify a process that has traditionally been fragmented or inefficient, then use technology to make it more connected.

That is one of the most interesting parts of Malaysia’s startup landscape in 2026.

The country’s technology sector is not simply producing startups for the Malaysian market. Increasingly, Malaysian companies are building products that can travel across Southeast Asia and, in some cases, much further.

Final Thoughts

Malaysia’s startup ecosystem is becoming more diverse, and the companies making the biggest technological changes are not necessarily concentrated in one sector.

From used cars and insurance to agriculture, procurement, retail and digital design, Malaysian founders are finding opportunities in industries where technology can solve practical problems.

CARSOME, StoreHub, PolicyStreet, Borong, Aonic, Aerodyne and LottieFiles represent seven different approaches to that opportunity.

Their stories also show why the Malaysian technology industry deserves attention beyond the usual discussion of Kuala Lumpur’s startup scene.

The more interesting question is no longer simply which Malaysian startups are raising money.

It is which companies are building technology that changes how people and businesses actually work.

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